by Mona Alami, Special for USA TODAY

by Mona Alami, Special for USA TODAY

"The afterlife is the only thing that matters to me, and I can only reach it by waging jihad," he said during a recent interview.

Traboulsi is among the many jihadists in the Middle East who are answering a call by radical clerics to enter the fight in Syria to depose dictator President Bashar Assad, according to analysts.

Abdel Ghani Jawhar, a known member of radical Islamist group Fatah al-Islam, was killed alongside other rebels in Syria in the spring. Jabhat al-Nusrah (the Victory Front) has claimed responsibility for suicide bombings and other attacks on regime targets across the country.

Jihadist ideologues, among them Jordanian Shaykh Abu Muhammad al-Tahawi and Lebanese Shaykh Abu al-Zahra al-Zubaydi, have said that Jabhat al-Nusrah is in Syria and they are exhorting Muslims to "to join or help finance" the group, says Aaron Zelin, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

"Jihadists were slow to grasp the monumental shifts in Syria and the region generally," he said in a recent report. "They have since adjusted and looked for avenues to exploit the changing contexts to their advantage."

Zelin and others estimate there are between about 1,000-3,000 foreign jihadists fighting in Syria, prodded by sermons and statements on websites from some of the top Muslim radicals and terror groups in the world.

Generally, the jihadists are Sunni Muslim who believe that taking part in a violent military holy war, or jihad, is the way to replace "apostate" regimes with ones that impose their brand of Islamic law. Al-Qaeda is among them.

In a video message earlier this year, Ayman al-Zawahri, the leader of al-Qaeda, called on adherents in Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon to stand up and support their "brothers in Syria."

Sunnis and Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have been listening and acting on the calls, according to reports in The Daily Star in Lebanon and other local outlets.

The media report that the men are joining the Abdallah Azzam brigades, a radical Palestinian group with ties to al-Qaeda that has claimed responsibility for several rocket attacks launched on Israel from southern Lebanon in the past few years.

"Palestinian fighters provide logistical support to Syrian revolutionaries, training them on the use of IEDs as well as on the planning of car bombs," says Hajj Maher Oueid, the leader of an Islamist party in the Palestinian camp of Ain al-Helweh in southern Lebanon.

Abu Ghureir al-Traboulsi, the jihadist who has been in Syria, fought alongside Fatah al-Islam during its war against the Lebanese army. He says he is motivated by revenge as well as faith.

His father was tortured by the Syrian army in the 1980s during the Syrian military and intelligence networks' 30-year occupation of Lebanon, he says. Many in Lebanon say they joined the fight against Assad because of family or tribal affiliations, especially those in border areas.

Assad is an Alawite Muslim, an offshoot of Shiite Islam that many Sunnis along the border consider apostasy. The conflict between Shiite Iran and the mostly Sunni Arab countries has emboldened Lebanese Sunnis to take sides in Syria, which is backed by Iran.

There are other reasons that Sunnis are joining the fight, Traboulsi says.

Some Sunnis in Lebanon say it was the Shiite Hezbollah that assassinated Sunni Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in 2005. Hezbollah - an Iranian and Syrian proxy in Lebanon that now controls the Lebanese government - is designated by the U.S. as a terrorist group.

"The policy of Hezbollah targeting Sunnis in Lebanon is seen as a humiliation by all. The only way to stop it is to overthrow Assad," Traboulsi says.

Late last month, 17 Lebanese Islamists were killed in Syria as they were infiltrating the region of Tall Kalakh, close to the northern Lebanese border, Sheik Nabil Rahim said. Rahim is a Salafist, which is another name for Wahabbists who believe in Islamic theocracies.

Traboulsi says he crossed into Syria and joined the Abu Walid battalion affiliated with the larger Farouk brigade, a powerful unit in the Free Syrian Army, made up of deserters and others from Assad's military. Both units are mostly composed of Syrians, though they include a small number of Lebanese, Iraqis, Qataris and Kuwaitis.

He says he participated in several military operations targeting Syrian army barracks as well as the headquarters of the Syrian Intelligence services. Traboulsi watches videos he has filmed in Syria of men carrying automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades.

"Every evening, we pray before we go to war against the Assad regime in order to be guaranteed a place in paradise if we die," he says with a smile.